Shade Tree Wisdom 9/25/08

There is a Chinese saying to the effect that if anyone could concentrate for as much as three minutes on a problem he could rule the world. That’s hard to do, and few can do it. It takes real effort and long practice to apply all our intelligence to any given situation. Our minds tend to wander, other thoughts crowd in uninvited. It takes long practice and much effort to close out everything but one idea, and concentrate on that.

Maybe that is the reason we really tend to overlook those three chapters [chapters 5 – 7], in St. Matthew. The ones we call “The Sermon on the mount’. It is a sermon preached by an unassuming carpenter from Nazareth, on a Galilean hillside. Simple, yet profound. They really do set out the foundations of the Christian life as it is meant to be lived.

The beginning verses we know as The Beatitudes (Matthew 51-12), simple, yet for-reaching in their implications. For instance “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied”. (5,6). Jesus is not talking about only increasing knowledge, reading the Bible much. Instead, He is talking about getting into line with God, not just knowing his will, but doing it. Becoming more and more Christ- like in our lives. It means taking God seriously and finding out how perfectly God’s truth fits into our real world existence.

And the end result of such a life, ‘They shall be satisfied.” Well fed, completely nourished, able to stand in any storm and live through the direst emergency. Even IKE.

But isn’t life like that. Not to accumulate things (which IKE can destroy in a moment), but in a better, richer understanding of the life we live in, of being aware of the world in which God has set us, and there, in that world, doing His will.

With this in mind, we can understand how the simple truths of the Sermon on the Mount are not heeded much. Here the Lord Jesus lays bare the fundamental hypocrisy of the religion of His day, and thus does it for much that we call religion in our day. The words strike with precision of a surgeon's knife and reveal what we often assume is real. These words strip away the excess baggage of much what we call religion and bring us back to the basics.

St. Paul sums it up when He said, “This one thing I know, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief”. That truth is enough for us, or should be.

May God bless your day as your walk always “as unto Him”.

GPD 9/25/08